Movie and television audiences are very familiar with previews, those one to three minute video clips that reveal highlights of upcoming shows. The preview clips, which are known as "trailers" in the film industry, are important promotional tools. They play on viewer emotions to entice viewers to see the program. The trailers are carefully crafted by the studios to present the most compelling sales pitch for watching a program. Given the importance of trailers, it is not uncommon for a studio to allocate a significant portion of the entire program budget to the production of a short trailer.
In the newer, interactive television (ITV) environment, it would be advantageous to provide trailers to attract potential viewers into renting a program over the interactive network. ITV systems have a single computerized control center, known as the "headend", which interactively communicates with multiple distributed television units located in subscriber homes. The headend provides traditional forms of programming, such as the familiar cable and broadcast programs, as well as newer forms of programming, such as video-on-demand. In the video-on-demand (VOD) mode of operation, a viewer can order video movies directly from his/her own television set. Indeed, in a full interactive entertainment network system like this invention, it is contemplated that a viewer will be able to order "on demand" movies, video games, television shows, and other video content programs from their home.
Video trailers would be particularly useful for the ITV video-on-demand mode to entice viewers into renting a movie, video game, or TV show. However, there is an unresolved issue with respect to how trailers can be conveniently supplied to selective viewer homes. Present designs of ITV systems anticipate having hundreds to thousands of movies, video games, and TV shows stored at the headend. The trailers for these programs will also be stored at the headend. One approach is to transmit the hundreds to thousands of trailers in sequential order, repeating the transmission each time the full repertoire is exhausted. But, this large volume of unrelated trailers is not very manageable or meaningful to the viewer, and thus, not useful from a practical or marketing standpoint. Viewers might become bored watching multiple trailers in which they have no interest and, as a result, switch out of the VOD mode to another channel.
Movie viewers, in particular, are accustomed to browsing for video movies in video rental stores. Such stores offer hundreds to thousands of videos, but have them grouped according to different categories. For instance, videos are often grouped by kind, such as new releases, oldies, westerns, foreign films, family films, and so forth. Other groupings might be by actor/actress name, alphabetical order of title, or topic. These groupings assist a shopper in locating a section of interest within which the shopper can limit his/her search for a suitable video movie.
It would be nice to provide the convenient organization afforded by a video store in the ITV video-on-demand environment. Unfortunately, unlike a video store which has an abundance of physical floor space to present many different movies, the ITV system only has the limited space available on a TV screen to present the options. Accordingly, it is one object of this invention to provide an ITV system that organizes video movies according to different categories and provides a manageable set of video trailers about the movies.
Another problem is that once the set of video trailers is provided, the viewer would like to scan the trailers at their own pace, skipping the unappealing ones and perhaps replaying the good ones. In today's remote control TV world, viewers have become conditioned to quickly scanning television channels, one after another, often staying on a channel for only a few seconds. This practice is known as "channel surfing". It is another objective of this invention to enable a viewer to "surf" through the grouped video trailers at their own rate.